Her travels have taken her from Papua New Guinea to the Arabian Gulf, Africa and Switzerland, where she worked at the CERN laboratory, the site of the Large Hadron Collider.

Today, she splits her time between Scotland and France: she has a home in the idyllic Highland village of Plockton – where she skippers a rescue boat – and her other home she had built in the equally picturesque village of Collioure in France.

“I’ve always had itchy feet but now I have the best of both worlds, living in the wild highlands and a remote corner of southern France,” said Jane, 57, whose second book, Autumn in Catalonia, has just been published.

Her wanderlust took her first to The Gambia in her 20s, where she taught English in a high school for two years – the current president of the West African country was one of her pupils.

She said: “It was a wonderful experience. I was paid the same salary as the locals and lived among them rather than as a wealthy expat.”

Jane pictured at the wheel of the Plockton rescue boat. (Image: Sunday Mail)

From there, she worked as director of a language school for three years in Bahrain, where she met husband Douglas. The widowed seaman from Plockton worked in the Gulf as a ship’s pilot and deputy harbourmaster.

Jane said: “Doug and his nine-year-old son, Alexander, hankered for Scotland so we moved to Plockton and I fell in love with the place. Highlanders are so warm, friendly and fun – it reminded me of living in The Gambia, where there’s also a strong community and nobody locks their door.”

After a couple of years, the couple’s feet began to itch once more and they moved with Alex and their one-year-old daughter Fiona to Papua New Guinea, where Jane taught French in an international school and Douglas worked as a ship’s pilot and deputy harbourmaster.

She said: “I have a restless, adventurous soul and the wide world beckoned. Papua New Guinea was a tropical paradise – we snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef and had a beach life at the edge of a rainforest and coconut plantations.

“But we decided to cut our stay short and go back to Scotland after a year when revolution broke out on a nearby island and it became unsafe for our children. Shortly after we left, the port town where we lived, Rabaul, was hit by an earthquake and disappeared completely.”

The MacKenzies settled in Greenock where Douglas worked on the River Clyde and Jane did a marketing degree, which led to a career recruiting international students from the Middle East and China for colleges and universities.

She had just gone freelance in 2003 when tragedy struck and her husband died suddenly of a brain aneurysm.

She said: “There was no warning – he died on the spot. It was a tough time. I was grieving but also had to make my new business work. What saved us all was moving back to Plockton, where we still had a family home and lots of good friends who supported us.”

When her daughter moved to Glasgow to attend college three years later, Jane found herself in an empty home.

She said: “I was rattling about with all this space in my life and didn’t know what to do with myself. I took up writing as part of the healing process. It helped me get over Doug’s death and also cope with loneliness.

“When you write, you fill your imaginary world with characters so you are never on your own, they’re always with you.”

Jane’s book, set in Africa, was never published, but the feedback from agents was encouraging and she didn’t give up on her dream of becoming an author.

And when she bought a holiday home in Collioure in French Catalonia, she found the inspiration she needed to write her first published novel, Daughter of Catalonia, which has sold 29,000 copies.

She said: “I’d been hankering after France since Doug died. He’d never been that keen as he didn’t speak French like me, but when I was on my own I started going back to the country I’d loved as a student.

“I fell in love with the village of Collioure as soon as I drove into it – it’s breathtakingly beautiful. And when I started to read about the region’s history during WW2, when it was flooded by Spanish Catalonian refugees, I knew I had my story and the book was born.”

Professor Higgs, the man behind the Higgs boson theory.

While writing the novel, Jane was offered a job in Geneva at CERN, which recreates the conditions just after the Big Bang to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

Jane, who is fluent in French, was working with British scientists, including the physicist Professor Peter Higgs, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the mass of subatomic particles predicting a new particle, the Higgs boson.

She said: “I was working there at the time of the Higgs boson discovery, which was tremendously exciting.

“I looked after the professor, who was mobbed by the paparazzi and was very uncomfortable with all the attention. We became friends and he’s visited Plockton.”

Collioure in France where Jane has a second home. (Image: Sunday Mail)

Now Jane lives part-time in Collioure, where she has built her dream house into the mountain face, and the rest of the time in Plockton, where she skippers the rescue boat for the sailing club, often having to rescue Alexander, 36, who now runs the consulting business she set up, and Fiona, 26, a nurse, when they capsize racing.

She said: “I write full-time when I’m in France. Autumn in Catalonia is the second in my Catalonia trilogy and is set over the border in Spain. It tells the story of three generations of women torn apart by the Spanish Civil War.”

Jane has just finished her third novel and has begun researching her fourth, set in Scotland and in Alexandria, Egypt, during WW2, which means she’ll be off on her travels again soon.

She said: “Research is a great excuse for travelling. I love writing – it’s much freer and more fulfilling than any work I’ve ever done.”

■ Autumn in Catalonia by Jane MacKenzie is out now, published by Allison and Busby.